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Post-Structuralism, Complexity and Poetics• Michael Dillon Michael

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Post-Structuralism, Complexity and Poetics• Michael Dillon Michael Post-structuralism, Complexity and Poetics • Michael Dillon Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at the University of Lancaster. Co-editor of the Institute’s journal, Cultural Values , he has also written extensively on continental philosophy, security and global liberal governance. • This essay began life in the form of a presentation to an ESRC sponsored seminar on ‘Complexity and the Social Sciences’ at the Centre for Social Theory and Technology at the University of Keele. I would like to thank all the participants in that seminar but most especially Bob Cooper and Rolland Munro. I have long- standing debts to their intelligence and to their friendship. I would also like to thank Julian Reid from whom I take my bearings in respect of the strategic and Sarah Dillon from whom (this time) I have taken my bearings in respect of Beckett. Thanks finally to the referees on this paper. Their comments were as generous as their criticisms were acute. 2 ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’ 3 Abstract Post-structuralism and complexity are plural and diverse modes of thought that share a common subscription to the ‘anteriority of radical relationality’. They nonetheless subscribe to a different ethic of life because they address the anteriority of radical relationality in different ways. Complexity remains strategic in its bid to become a power-knowledge of the laws of becoming. It derives that strategic ethic from its scientific interest in the implicate order of non-linearity that is said to subvert Newtonian science. Post-structuralism is poetic. It derives its poetic ethic from Heidegger and from the re-working of orphic and tragic sensibilities to radical relationality with the radically non-relational. Observing that all poetry is complexity avant la lettre , the paper illustrates these points with the Odyssey and concludes that while complexity is ultimately concerned with fitness, post-structuralism is pre-occupied with justice. Introduction: The Co-incidence of Post-structuralism and Complexity My response to the terms ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘complexity’ is frankly Nietzschean. Only that which has never had a history, Nietzsche constantly reminds us, can be ‘defined’. That is why he called those who think that they honour a thing by de- historicising it, ‘Egyptians’. They mummify it instead. "Nothing real," he says, 'escape[s] their hands alive." (Nietzcshe, 1997: 18). Since post-structuralism and complexity have had, and continue to display, a vexed and complicated history I do not intend to compare them by defining them. I nonetheless still do want to take the risk of differentiating between them. If we are to remain faithful to Nietzsche’s insight, that difference must 4 necessarily be concerned not with contrasting definitions but with how each exhibits their liveliness. That in turn means asking the question what disposition or ethos – what form of life - is exemplified and championed by them? In comparing them, therefore, it is not simply a matter of what we can know, and of better ways of knowing. It is a question of how we live, of how we may live and, increasingly perhaps also, of how we may continue to live. These are not simply my points. They are points continuously made by post-structuralists and complexity scientists themselves. Even, for the latter, in their most epistemologically committed moments; since those who champion the hegemony of epistemology, whatever the epistemology happens to be, always do so in the name of human betterment. Navigating between oversimplification and obfuscation here is a tricky business that recalls what Derrida once said in the course of his demolition of John Searle. “One shouldn’t complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten round.” (Derrida, 1988b: 119). Any sensible account of post-structuralism will begin then by saying that it refers to such a diverse body of work and thought that it cannot be captured in a summary definition. The point is borne out by post-structuralism’s genealogy. Among its sources are German Idealism, Romanticism and the advent of “Literature”, the linguistic turn in Philosophy, the Saussurean turn in Linguistics, the ‘destruktion’ of metaphysics that followed the Kantian turn in philosophy (despite the fact there is no simple escape from metaphysics), and the work of deconstruction. It is commonly influenced also by what Michel Serres and Gianni Vattimo would call the advent of generalised communication 5 and distribution (Serres, 1982; Vattimo, 1992), or what complexity scientists might call ‘generalised reference’ (Cilliers, 1998). Yet, from its origins in this diversity of intellectual movements there are nonetheless positions to which so-called post-structuralist thinkers, albeit in radically different ways and for sometimes radically different reasons as well, might be said to subscribe. These include the following. The failure of onto-theology, over millennia, satisfactorily to establish the ground of Being (Nietzsche, 1983; Heidegger, 1968). The pervasive significance of Language in human existence (Heidegger, 1982; Derrida, 1976). The originary and fundamentally disordered nature of the logos (Nietzsche, 1989; Heidegger; 1985; Derrida; 1987). The related inevitable misfire of all enunciation (Derrida, 1976; Butler, 1997). The related and equally inevitable miscount of all accounts of the distribution of speaking bodies (Rancière, 1998). The radical relationality of bodies (Deleuze, 1988). The emergent property of bodies contingent upon the modes of relationality productive of and mediated by them (Foucault, 1985). Language as the other of all others, or the relation of foreignness as such: what Blanchot calls “the relation of the third kind” (Blanchot, 1993: 66). The temporality of being and the finitude of human existence (Heidegger, 1984; Agamben, 1991). To put it simply, that means death and its irreversibility. To put it more technically, and in Heideggerean terms, it means being- toward-death (Heidegger, 1967). Hostility also in one degree or another to equating human existence and excellence with what Heidegger called the project of representative- calculative thought and the privilege it grants to epistemology over ontology and ethicality. Human existence, in contrast, understood as always already ethical. Ethical not understood here by reference to a command issued by some superior being or moral law. 6 Ethical understood, instead, in terms of the ethos or way of being of things derived from their location within an inescapable matrix of relationality that is both diachronic as well as synchronic, temporal as well as spatial. Or what Deleuze called kinetic and dynamic, which is not quite the same thing either (Deleuze, 1988). The changing specification of bodies in terms of their bearings within a relational matrix (Dillon, 1996); contingent upon what Deleuze in his account of Spinoza also called their longitude and latitude, their kinetic and dynamic attributes and their capacity to affect as well as to be affected (Deleuze, 1988). The longer the list of such subscriptions becomes, however, the more attenuated the links between them. The more attenuated the links, the more violence is also done to the reflections, positions and commitments of the philosophers most usually associated with post-structuralism: Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to name but a prominent few of the usual suspects. Learning from their near contemporaries, and from each other, all these thinkers were deeply indebted also to different sources, and different combinations of sources, from within the wider tradition of western philosophy and science. Heidegger engaging Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Husserl, as well as Aristotle, Plato and the pre-Socratics. Derrida indebted to his readings of Plato, Kant, Hegel and Freud as well as Heidegger and Nietzsche. Foucault betraying his immersion not only in Nietzsche and Heidegger but also his indebtedness to Canguilhelm. Deleuze drew perhaps pre-eminently on Spinoza and Bergson. Levinas was indebted to the entire chiasmus of what Derrida called Greekjew/Jewgreek. Such references as these are of course indicative. They do not in any way exhaust the range of influences to which these thinkers were indebted. Nor do they say anything 7 about the different ways in which they combined their influences. Neither, finally, do I want to suggest that such thinkers were only influenced by philosophers or by science. They were not. Just as certain poetry (Trakl, Rilke and Holderlin) was important for Heidegger (Taminiaux, 1993; Foti, 1992), so also was ‘Literature’ and ‘Writing’ for Derrida, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze and others (Lacloue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988; Critchley, 1997). You therefore quickly reach the point where it is the very the profound differences between such so-called post-structuralist figures that forces itself to the top of the agenda. Progress in terms of understanding and interpretation of their contribution to thought becomes critically dependent not only upon the ability to discriminate within as well as between their work, but also to recognise that they differ widely in terms of their very understanding of the project of thought itself. Contrast, for example, Heidegger, whose path of thinking at least after Being and Time (1967) was never directed towards the
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